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Just what the title says, how do I find the oldest email in Gmail? I know ho to find the oldest email from a specific person, but I’m interested in finding the oldest email, regardless of the sender or the label/folder it resides in at the moment. How can I do this without manually going through each label?

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  • No button, but it takes only 3t o 4 minutes to page-click (25email per page) back through 5500 emails, to start from the oldest. Kill, archive or use.
    – user129640
    Jul 26, 2016 at 0:21

2 Answers 2

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All Mail includes all the mail.

  1. Click on the All Mail button on the side bar.
  2. Right next to the < > buttons you should see a link 1-100 of xx,xxx → click on the link.
  3. The drop down should give you two choices: newest and oldest; select oldest.
  4. You should now be on the last page.

Note: if the All Mail label isn't on the sidebar, it can be added via: Gear → Setting → Labels → show.

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  • 2
    I completely forgot about All Mail. Thanks!
    – Alex
    Oct 17, 2013 at 11:05
  • This doesn't necessarily work if there are many emails with whatever filter criteria you're using. Instead, see the method offered by @prplhaz4
    – samthebrand
    Jul 31, 2016 at 0:25
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There doesn't seem to be an "oldest" link in gmail anymore so using this link to go to a really big page number seems to work:

https://mail.google.com/mail/#search//p99999

Method taken from systembash.com

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    Actually this doesn't work. It gives me an error Invalid search query - returning all mail.
    – Micer
    Nov 15, 2016 at 9:15
  • You can still kinda do this, but the url now is https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#all/p1000, just keep incrementing the p1000 until you hit the last page, it's not ideal, but it's faster then pressing the > on for the 100s+ pages you have to get through.
    – Mint
    Apr 28, 2021 at 1:04

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